Quality Assessment Of The English Translations Of The PRC Civil Code Based On Transitivity And Modality

The Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China embeds itself in the private law culture with Chinese characteristics and the English translation of the Civil Code contributes to communicating China’s legal ideology.Close attention has accordingly been paid to the quality aspect of its English translation,with many studies focusing on the translation of specific legal terms and individual translation problems in some provisions.However,little research has established a linguistic understanding of the Civil Code and assessed whether its English translations have re-presented the main meanings and legal ideology of the original using appropriate linguistic resources.This study aims to systematically evaluate two influential English translations of the Civil Code from a linguistic perspective,and proposes associated research questions:(1)What are the lexicogrammatical features and ideology in the original?(2)How are the lexicogrammatical features and the ideology re-presented by the translations different from/similar to those of the original?(3)Why are the lexicogrammatical and ideological mismatches(in)appropriate for realizing the purpose of the translations?In answer to these questions,this study builds on prior TQA research and systemic functional translation studies,factors in characteristics of legislative language,and adopts transitivity and modality systems,CDA,and corpus tools.It analyzes the original and translations and compares their lexicogrammatical patterns,associated meanings,and ideology both qualitatively and quantitatively.Finally,value judgement on the mismatches is made against relevant studies and principles of legal translation.Linguistically,the original employs various process types associated with persons as active participants to encode the meaning that persons actively perform civil activities,possess private rights,make free expressions of will,request right-protection,and that the law also governs civil conduct to a meaningful extent.Moreover,quite a few lowvalued obligations are employed to express the right-oriented legal meaning;many high-valued obligations are also used to strike a right-obligation balance.Consequently,the original conveys the legal ideology that the law recognizes persons’ private autonomy while it also imposes necessary regulation and guidance on them.Whereas transitivity mismatches reflect that in the translations,there are shifts made to adapt to the structural differences between Chinese and English,different linguistic preferences,as well as inaccurate and inconsistent translation problems.Also,the over-/misuse of median/high-valued obligation by the translations disrupts the rightobligation balance and inappropriately highlights imposition of obligations.The original legal ideology is thus impaired in the translations.On the other hand,the linguistic resources used in the translations deviate from the linguistic conventions in English-speaking countries where plain language has been used in legislative drafting,which is inappropriate for communicating the original’s main ideas to target readers.Overall,both translations do not fully employ appropriate linguistic resources to re-present the legal ideology of the Civil Code;inaccuracy,ambiguity,and inconsistency also exist in re-presenting the ST’s main meanings.TT1 is,however,relatively better than TT2.The linguistic features of the Civil Code and TQA results summarized in this study could practically contribute to a linguistic understanding of the legislative drafting of the Civil Code,provide references to improving its English translations,and facilitate China’s legal-cultural communication.It is also hoped that this study has theoretical implications for quality assessment of legislative translations.